Shanghai Dumplings
Posted by Prashant Katwa
So we get off the tram at Flinders St. Station and walk down a couple of block to Little Bourke St. We’re look for a specific street name. I forgot the name, but we do find it. It’s actually an alleyway-kind of sketchy. It’s in the middle of Chinatown, so the alleyway has a few restaurants. We’re looking for a dumplings place whose name we weren’t quite sure of. All I knew was that it was called something-dumplings. After a few minutes we find it and its actually called Shanghai Dumplings. We get there and there is a line out the door. We decide to just walk around it because we’re supposed to be meeting up with a group of people. When we get to the front, we see a couple of people try to go upstairs. I don’t know if they were going to try to find a table or to go use the restroom or what, but the host, an old chinese man, stops them from going up. This chinese man seems to be running around trying to do like 10 things at once. He asks us “how many”, and we say that we are looking for a group. He appears to hear us, but then walks away. We decide to sneak past him and go upstairs to find our group. We look around for a while but then determine that they’re not here yet. So, we go bak downstairs. We get back in the line that starts our at the door and goes out into the alleyway. We tell Mr. old chinese man that we need a table for 8. He then says “how many? 4?” and we say no 8. He again seems flustered and asks everyone in line, which is now more like a bunch of groups, if there is a group of two. The rest of our group soon arrives.
I was there with my friend Timur and one of our friends who is in fact from South Carolina, here in Melbourne doing here graduate degree. Actually Timur and I didn’t really know the rest of the group, we were there accompanying our friend. She had invited us to come with here to a going away dinner for one of her friends. So we wait for a while and eventually get seated by a younger guy who works at the dumplings place.
The restaurant was very very busy that evening. In fact, I would surmise that it is busy on most nights. This is mainly because of their amazing dumplings of course. We ordered family style and got tons of dumplings for very cheap. They were very good. Now, many restaurants across Australia are BYO, meaning bring your own (wine, beer, etc.). So, one of the guys in our group when next door and bought some beer and brought it back to our table. Now, because this place was so busy, they had apparently ran out of plates and all we got were these small bowl things, which could fit like one dumpling. Anyway, the other odd things, was that they didn’t serve any water. All they had was this hot tea stuff which I thought was pretty bad, but apparently Timur didn’t have any trouble drinking. But other than that, the evening went well and the dinner was delicious. I was so full afterwards.
Halfway through the dinner, I was looking at the menu again and I saw that there was a picture of some chinese dude on the back. Turns out, it was the same man who was running around the restaurant. I think he must’ve been the owner or manager or someone. Anyway, haha, the menu said his name was Bobby or something. This dude was hilarious. Like no joke. We were like messing with him when we left. haha.
Anyway, I guess there’s no real point to this post, maybe just that Shanghai Dumplings is a pretty good place to eat. In fact, Timur, myself and a few of our other friends are going again tonight for Timur’s birthday dinner. I’ll let you all know if we have another interesting experience.
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